I'm deeply offended, doubly offended by the attempts to defend yourselves, and we're done. You have convinced me thoroughly that Libertarianism is rooted in a mental disease that causes people to lose all empathy. If you can't see the comparison I referred to in the above blog post, then in addition to being amoral, you're clearly retarded as well.

This is a amazing post. You've made a claim...an accusation. You were asked where someone made the comparison you claim and this is your response.

You assume...you are convinced that some people who don't agree with you are mentally diseased and retarded and also lack empathy.

Its like: If you dont like being stolen from then move; if you dont like work-brigades then move; if you dont like concentration camps then move; if you dont like unfounded incarceration then move; if you want your rights to be observed then move somewhere theyll be acknowledged. So, the obstruction of rights within an arbitrary border is OKAY because a law deems it okay.
In trying to understand Ive come to the conclusion that the users of such a phrase accept the idea that the criminal has legitimate authority over the victim simply because the victim is in the criminals territory? The problem with this is that it validates all abuses on the property owners property by the owner.

This should not be viewed as legitimate ever. Just because people live in a certain region doesnt mean they are subject to the capricious ruling of someone else who doesnt acknowledge their Natural Rights.

Theres no way in hell someone can rationally defend a If you dont like it, you can leave-stance given to the Jews in Nazi Germany, to the Blacks in the United States, to the Natives in the United States. And yet, they try to use that same rationale for us simply by stating well you can leave the country. But no, you cannot just leave the country.

It's not like, "If you don't like concentration camps, them move." It's not like that at all, and that statement, and anyone who defends that statement lacks acceptable moral values.

It's far more like, "if you don't like not having the right to drive 120mph on the highway then move. If you don't like not having the right to add melanine to your milk powder to increase your profit then move. If you don't like having to pay for safety testing in your coal mine then move."

But actually, it's more like that, but it's not like that. Because typical as ever, it's you who have missed my point.

The point is not so much that if you don't like something (whether you consider it negative or not) then move. The point is I'm encouraging you to find a place where you are not taxed, and where your property rights are also still protected from lawless action. Or a place where there's a great health care system in place without government involvement. Because such places don't exist, not because they haven't been tried, but because they've failed and they are not workable in a society where a large faction of the people are selfish and lawless by nature.

It's not like, "If you don't like concentration camps, them move." It's not like that at all, and that statement, and anyone who defends that statement lacks acceptable moral values.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonton

It's far more like, "if you don't like not having the right to drive 120mph on the highway then move. If you don't like not having the right to add melanine to your milk powder to increase your profit then move. If you don't like having to pay for safety testing in your coal mine then move."

And again you fall back on your ridiculous dystopian view of what the world would be with out the massive state apparatus that exists. You pretend like the examples you give (sometimes real, sometime fabricated out of whole cloth) is the common and widespread reality or at least would be absent the state. You vision has businesses that typically want to sicken, maim and kill their customers and/or employees and only the state is holding them back. Your vision lacks the insight to realize that governments (including the US government) have killed more innocent and unsuspecting people than businesses in the free market ever have. And your vision of the world completely ignores the deep and widespread negative consequences of state action and focuses only on the apparent and immediately obvious positive consequences. In fact you appear to oblivious to the possibility that there are any negative consequences to state action.

You seem incapable of viewing these things in any other way. That's sad.

What it has really been like is: "If you don't like people telling you what to do at almost every turn and paying your 'fair share' as determined by tonton, then leave."

Which translate into: "If you don't like the slow, steady but definite erosion of freedom, then move." or "If you don't like some immoral action that's going on, continuing and even increasing, then move." or "If you don't like some people behaving like you are their property."

This retort is intended to casually dismiss someone you disagree with. It's the leftist equivalent of "America: Love it or leave it."

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonton

Because such places don't exist,

So you admit to presenting a false option. Thanks.

The real point in all of this is that we wish to strive for greater freedom and morality...but these cannot be achieved through less freedom and morality...which is the path we're on right now. We strive for a society where we don't have a bunch of fucking arrogant, elitist pricks telling us what we can and can't do and assuming that we're dumber than they are. We strive for a society where a sense of entitlement means we are entitled to take things from other people, so long as the intermediary is the state. We strive for a society in which some people don't act like other people are their property (or children).

The biggest irony in all of this is that you are living in one of the freest places in the world! If we in the US had things the way you do in Hong Kong there would be much less complaining.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tonton

not because they haven't been tried, but because they've failed and they are not workable in a society where a large faction of the people are selfish and lawless by nature.

I disagree. What doesn't work very well in a world where a large faction of the people are selfish and lawless by nature is giving some of them tons of power over others. That's a recipe for disaster. Your blindness to this grave risk is quite astonishing actually.

Tragedy of the commons - imagine if you met Stalin, who was willing to push 30 million of his own people into a churning death machine to stop Hitler, or if you met Hitler, how would you self-organize to stop that without a dictator willing to kill his own citizens?

Our current various world governments have evolved into what they are, constantly changing with the weak ones dying out - trying out a new form of government during a (probably transitory) time of wealth and peace is pretty dangerous, imho.

The US supplants our limited democracy with intense nationalism, designed to convince poor farm boys to lay down their lives - that and our geographic isolation and ample natural resources have been the things that kept us alive. Look how long it took us to enter the world wars, as a result of democracy - volentaryism would be even more timid, imho.

Tragedy of the commons - imagine if you met Stalin, who was willing to push 30 million of his own people into a churning death machine to stop Hitler, or if you met Hitler, how would you self-organize to stop that without a dictator willing to kill his own citizens?

This is a fair, if extreme, point. But is it a reasonable assumption that the bigger, more monied, more equipped bully always wins, particularly in the invasion and occupation of a foreign country?

I mean the US has had a hell of a time in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan) not to mention walking away tail between legs from Vietnam. It seems that a determined (and almost certainly voluntary) force of "guerillas" can frustrate and out battle a bigger bully. We actually see lots of examples of this. In fact the American revolution is probably a fair reasonable example of this.

I guess what I'm saying is that it might be a bit presumptuous to assume that a) the bigger bully will attack this society, b) the the people of the society are unarmed and ill-equipped to defend themselves, c) that they will not band together to help and to defend each other (did you know that in the US, more than 70% of firefighters are volunteers...have you witnessed the voluntary, communal response in many communities to natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and tornadoes?), and d) that the (presumably) smaller society cannot effectively fight a guerilla war against an invading foe.

Yes a larger attacker could just "go nuclear" and completely obliterate the people and property...presumably to get some natural resource they might be sitting on. But I think it's a bit quick to assume the more voluntary society is completely defenseless.

Finally, if such concerns are valid and probable, one could take a small step away from 100% pure voluntarist to accommodate a national defense apparatus. But that could also be handled in a citizen militia fashion.

I would be more comfortable with a country that had a strong military force for common defense that could react at a moments notice. The US war of independence was started by us, so we had time to prepare, if we had to self-organize to repel an invader we would be pretty bad off by the time people decided to volunteer for helping in any large numbers. Also - you would probably see states far from the initial invasion saying "we don't want to get involved", just like the US said about Poland in WWII.

I have dual US/Canadian citizenship, and one of my main worries is that things will get so bad in the US that we will invade Canada - converting the US to a volentaryist society would actually be better for me since that invasion would be must less likely to happen en-mass. Plus, the first time the states disagreed on anything, the country would break into less strong pieces.

I would be more comfortable with a country that had a strong military force for common defense that could react at a moments notice.

Fair enough. But again you are assuming that such a thing could or would not exist in a more voluntary society. That's an assumption and, possibly, an incorrect one.

Quote:

Originally Posted by e1618978

The US war of independence was started by us, so we had time to prepare, if we had to self-organize to repel an invader we would be pretty bad off by the time people decided to volunteer for helping in any large numbers.

Possibly. The point of that example was that a smaller, less organized, less well funded, less experienced group of volunteers frustrated the British military through more creative and guerilla-like tactics.

Quote:

Originally Posted by e1618978

I have dual US/Canadian citizenship, and one of my main worries is that things will get so bad in the US that we will invade Canada - converting the US to a volentaryist society would actually be better for me since that invasion would be must less likely to happen en-mass. Plus, the first time the states disagreed on anything, the country would break into less strong pieces.

And, again, we need not go "all in" on a 100% pure voluntaryist country/society...but moving in that direction...away from the nanny/warfare/welfare state...reverting more, but maybe not all, things to voluntary interactions and exchanges...would be a nice change of pace.

And, again, we need not go "all in" on a 100% pure voluntaryist country/society...but moving in that direction...away from the nanny/warfare/welfare state...reverting more, but maybe not all, things to voluntary interactions and exchanges...would be a nice change of pace.

I agree with you there. I used to be a fairly extreme libertarian, and the 2008 banking crisis made me re-evaluate it quite a bit. I think that there are three fundamental problems with libertarianism:

1) You can do more harm to someone than you can repay - like murdering a child or the banking crisis. In these cases I think that the government should be there to prevent the harm in the first place, like with severe banking regulation until blood comes out of their noses.

2) Over reliance on civil courts - I don't like how powerful the whole law profession is already, if everything was settled in lawsuits, lawyers would rule. Also, civil courts protect rich people a heck of a lot more than they do poor people, and the lawyers take all the money.

3) Medicine - medical insurance is an inherently collectivist idea, it works much better if insurance companies are not allowed to kick you out as soon as you get sick.

I still am a libertarian on social issues - I'm in favor of gay marriage, ending the war on drugs, legalizing prostitution and gambling, etc. And I also would like to close all foreign military bases and downsize the military.

A proper analysis of that whole fiasco actually ought to make people re-evaluate the various moral hazard situations created by the government.

Quote:

Originally Posted by e1618978

I think that there are three fundamental problems with libertarianism:

1) You can do more harm to someone than you can repay - like murdering a child or the banking crisis. In these cases I think that the government should be there to prevent the harm in the first place, like with severe banking regulation until blood comes out of their noses.

What's interesting is this. The banking system in this country is not a free-market system. Not at all. Not one bit. Not in any real way. In a truly free banking system, I contend that what you saw would not have happened and certainly not on the scale it did. This is a far more complex and involved topic than can usually be covered in this kind of forum. Needless to say, what you say is more a function of government intervention in the market than "freedom" run amuck.

Quote:

Originally Posted by e1618978

2) Over reliance on civil courts - I don't like how powerful the whole law profession is already, if everything was settled in lawsuits, lawyers would rule. Also, civil courts protect rich people a heck of a lot more than they do poor people, and the lawyers take all the money.

Here again, there is a government factor involved that's not immediately obvious: Government licensing of lawyers. One primary problem here is limiting supply (and therefore increasing cost for everyone, but especially the poor). Secondly, it increases their power as you have noted. Break this monopoly and this would improve greatly. Secondly, one major problem with government courts is how politicized they are. Judges are and have become politicians (to a degree). There is no reward for consistently making just judgements or penalty for consistently making unjust judgements. If they are in a "law and order" state/county/city...there will be a tendency for them to hand down harsher judgements that may not always be just. Private mediators/arbitrators/judges on the other hand would have an incentive to ensure their judgements were fair and just and wise and reasonable else risk losing business.

Quote:

Originally Posted by e1618978

3) Medicine - medical insurance is an inherently collectivist idea, it works much better if insurance companies are not allowed to kick you out as soon as you get sick.

I tend to think this is a fundamentally a contractual problem. If you have an insurance contract and you do get kicked out because you're sick...this is likely a breach of contract on the part of the insurance company and can and should be adjudicated as such. Furthermore, insurance companies with this reputation are unlikely to find future paying customers and are likely to lose existing paying customers over the fear that this would happen.

I think there are market mechanisms that would handle these situations. Not always perfectly...but no one is claiming perfection in the free market (even though some accuse me of Utopian thinking...the irony of this accusation appears lost on the accusers. ) I think there are a few things that happen though: 1) People see one or two incidents that seem wrong or unjust or something and they immediately assume a couple of things: evil intentions of one party and/or the problem is huge and widespread so they shout "there oughta be a law!", 2) people get really impatient and want or expect an immediate "fix", 3) people assume that the state will provide that immediate "fix" and, 4) there are never any negative consequences with the state's action that might, possibly outweigh the apparent positive consequences. All of this combined with a knee-jerk reaction and rush to "do something" (because you've can't not do something) leads us into a mess that often makes things worse sometimes in obvious ways but, more often, in subtle ways.

Quote:

Originally Posted by e1618978

I still am a libertarian on social issues - I'm in favor of gay marriage, ending the war on drugs, legalizing prostitution and gambling, etc. And I also would like to close all foreign military bases and downsize the military.

1. SEC let the investment banks leverage up to unlimited amounts, this was a case were regulation was removed, not extra regulation added. If this was not done Lehmann would not have blown up, since they would have been at 8-1 instead of 100-1
2. No regulation of CDSes, if they were regulated like other kinds of insurance AIG would not have blown up
3. No regulation of mortgage origination, there must have been controls on this at some point
4. No regulation of the sale of mortgages, combined with #3 lead to wholesale fraud. And once the various forms of fraud got discovered, the people went unpunished because it was that or the country self-destructs, that is what I mean when I say you can do more damage than you can ever repay.
5. Fed leaving interest rates too low too long after dot com boom
6. Freddy Mac and Fanny May getting bullied into buying crap from #4

Now if your point was that the Fed should be replaced with something else, and that FNM and FRE should not exist, I agree - but they didn't come close to causing the whole problem. Most of the problem was caused by banking deregulation.

And before you say that government sponsored mortgage programs were the cause, the number of those mortgages dropped from 10% of the mortgage market down to 2% - they just could not compete with countrywide who was giving 110% mortgages to anyone with a pulse.

2----

Even if anyone could be a lawyer, rich people could afford much better lawyers than poor people. I think it would be horrible to have this kind of system resolve most disputes, you are just asking for a repeat of the French revolution if you try this - it would be very unjust.

3-----

Medical insurance is more complicated than you are making out. What if you get a pre-existing condition while you are working for a big company? You end up being a slave to that company because if you ever lose your job you won't be able to get medical insurance elsewhere. This kind of system leaves everyone in fear.

1. SEC let the investment banks leverage up to unlimited amounts, this was a case were regulation was removed, not extra regulation added.

I never claimed that it was too much regulation per se. I said it was government involvement in the market that creates and created moral hazard situations. A compelling argument can be made that these companies knew or were highly confident they'd get bailed out if the shit hit the fan. And guess what happened.

What if you get a pre-existing condition while you are working for a big company? You end up being a slave to that company because if you ever lose your job you won't be able to get medical insurance elsewhere. This kind of system leaves everyone in fear.

What makes you assume you get your health insurance through your employer? You don't get other important forms of insurance this way? How do you think that situation came to pass and even persists to this day?

John Edwards was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, and he was a leading contender for the presidential nomination in 2008. We all now know he cheated on his wife and lied to America about it throughout much of that time. Now he's facing potential jail time if convicted of using campaign funds for a cover-up.

Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner has put on quite a show lately.

The soap operas aren't confined to Democrats. Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently confessed to cheating for decades and had a child he hid from the public for years.

Not that long ago, Newt Gingrich was cheating on one of his ex-wives while haranguing Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky.

Some people argue that these people's private lives should not be of concern to the public.

A counter-argument is that people who lie about their private lives are also likely to lie about official business as well. Could they also lie about weapons of mass destruction, or global warming, or the necessity of a trillion-dollar bailout?

So what's my point? That Libertarians are more honest than Republicans and Democrats?

Actually, no. My point is, human beings are fallible, and many of us are dishonest and easily corrupted.

That's one of the reasons why government should have as little power as possible. When human beings have the power to control others' lives, our natural fallibility makes us very dangerous.

What's worse, power tends to corrupt us and make us even more dishonest, conniving, and cruel.

We Libertarians understand that humans are fundamentally imperfect, and we will always be imperfect.

Libertarians aren't simply looking for honest politicians. We are looking for politicians who understand this problem, and who will stand on principle to take power away from government, and return it to the individual.

Leftist criticisms of libertarianism have surged lately, a phenomenon warranting explanation. We libertarians could justifiably find it all quite confusing. For decades we have thought our battle a largely losing one, at least in the short term. We are a tiny, relatively powerless minority. The state has raged on, expanding in virtually every direction, for my entire lifetime and that of my parents. Yet nearly every week our beloved philosophy of non-aggression is subject to some progressive’s relatively widely read hatchet job. On the surface, it appears at least as misdirected as the rightwing hysteria about Marxists during the Cold War. But at least Marxism was the supposed tenet of the Soviet Union, a regime with thousands of nukes ready to launch. Why all this concern about little ol’ us?

We could go through all these critiques line by line and expose the many factual errors and gross misinterpretations, whether disingenuous or unintentional. But it might be more worthwhile to ask, Why all this focus on the supposed demonic threat of libertarianism in the first place?

It was not too long ago that the Slate’s Jacob Weisberg declared the end of libertarianism. Time of death? The financial collapse, which proved our "ideology makes no sense." Not three years later, the same web publication is exposing "the liberty scam": "With libertarianism everywhere, it's hard to remember that as recently as the 1970s, it was nowhere to be found."

Funny, I thought libertarianism was dead. Now it is an insidious scam worthy of multiple articles exposing the danger that lurks beneath the façade. In 28 months our defunct ideology has resurrected into a ubiquitous threat.

If only. Despite the leftists’ hysteria that libertarianism is permeating the Tea Parties, defining Republican politics, and central to the message espoused by Glenn Beck, this is so far from the truth, so paranoid a delusion, that it makes Beck’s most incoherent sketches upon his notorious chalkboard appear like plausible, sensible political analysis by comparison.

The government grows bigger every day and every year, no matter how you measure it. There are more laws, more police, and more prisoners than ever. The empire and presidential power have been on the rise for decades. Spending has increased at all levels. New bureaucracies, edicts, social programs, and prohibitions crop up continually. Almost no regulations are ever repealed – yes, back in the late 1990s, Clinton signed a partial deregulation of certain bank practices (opposed by Ron Paul, as it was phony to begin with), which had nothing to do with the financial meltdown and yet is blamed for every economic problem that unfolded in the last decade. Yes, back in the early 1980s, Reagan cut marginal tax rates while increasing other taxes and positioning himself to double the federal government, and, according to the left-liberals, we’ve been in a laissez-faire tailspin ever since. But anyone who really thinks libertarianism has been dominant in this country clearly has very little understanding of what libertarianism is – or is utterly detached from reality.

Weisberg was wrong in 2008 when he predicted the demise of our philosophy after an era of major influence, and his fellow-traveling writer at Slate is wrong now when he thinks he sees it everywhere. It is telling, however, that when they choose to go after the Tea Party conservatives, the beltway think tanks, and the GOP rightwing, they do not generally attack these people for their many unlibertarian views (views that the left claims to oppose as well): Their love of the police state, their support for the drug war, their disregard for the Fourth Amendment, their comfort with torture, their demonization of immigrants and foreigners, and, above all, their unwavering penchant for warmongering. No, you see, these positions, while unfashionable in some liberal circles, are at least within the respectable parameters of debate. But if some conservative ever mentioned the Tenth Amendment favorably, questioned the legitimacy of the welfare state, or said perhaps the budget deficit should be cut by at least a third this year – horror upon horrors! This is far beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion. And, as it so happens, these are positions that libertarians would find somewhat agreeable, and so we see the real problem with Glenn Beck isn’t his flirtations with fascism and militarism; it’s the quirky way he wonders aloud if government has gotten a bit too big and might pose a threat to freedom. The populist conservatives are not exposed for being protectionists – that much is tolerable – but rather for clinging to their guns and localism. The neolibertarian policy wonks are attacked not for being soft on war but for being too hard on the state.

The fact is, most left-liberals do hate and fear libertarianism more than they oppose modern conservatism. It makes sense. For one thing, the conservatives and liberals seemingly agree on 90% of the issues, certainly when compared to the views of principled libertarians. They all favor having a strong military. We tend to want to abolish standing armies. They all think the police need more power – to crack down on guns, if you’re a liberal, and to crack down on drugs, if you’re a conservative. We libertarians think police have way too much power and flirt with the idea of doing away with them altogether. The conservatives and liberals all want to keep Medicare, Social Security, and public schools intact, if tweaked around the edges. We see these programs for what they are: the parasitic class’s authoritarian and regressive programs to control the youth and foment intergenerational conflict.

Second of all, conservatism is a much better foil for liberals to attack than libertarianism is. They can deal with the friendly rivalry between red-state fascism and blue-state socialism. With the central state as their common ground, the two camps enjoy hurling insults at each other, playing culture war games, vying over power, doing what they can to expand government knowing that even should they lose control, it will eventually come back to them. This might explain why when leftists condemn conservatism for its hypocritical claims to libertarianism, they seldom follow up by saying true libertarianism would in fact be preferable. To the contrary, the argument is usually that since the conservatives are collectivists after all, they should warm up to the liberal flavor of collectivism espoused by Democrats. The left correctly says the right does not embrace genuine free enterprise, but socialism for the rich, and that the right is not really for small government, not when it comes to imposing its values. But then does the left conclude that libertarianism is not so bad, after all? Not usually. For in the end, the more anti-government the right is, the more a menace it is to the left’s project of social democracy and humanitarian militarism.

But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.

But Barack Obama is really what has made the left-liberal illusion fold under the weight of its own absurdity. Here we had the perfect paragon of left-liberal social democracy. He beat the centrist Hillary Clinton then won the national election. He had a Democratic Congress for two years. He had loads of political capital by virtue of following a completely failed and unpopular Republican administration. The world welcomed him. The center cheered him. And what did he do?

He shoveled money toward corporate America, banks and car manufacturers. He championed the bailouts of the same Wall Street firms his very partisans blamed for the financial collapse. He picked the CEO of General Electric to oversee the unemployment problem. He appointed corporate state regulars for every major role in financial central planning. After guaranteeing a new era of transparency, he conducted all his regulatory business behind a shroud of unprecedented secrecy. He planned his health care scheme, the crown jewel of his domestic agenda, in league with the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

He continued the war in Iraq, even extending Bush’s schedule with a goal of staying longer than the last administration planned. He tripled the U.S. presence in Afghanistan then took over two years to announce the eventual drawdown to bring it back to only double the Bush presence. He widened the war in Pakistan, launching drone attacks at a dizzying pace. He started a war on false pretenses with Libya, shifting the goal posts and doing it all without Congressional approval. He bombed Yemen and lied about it.

He enthusiastically signed on to warrantless wiretapping, renditioning, the Patriot Act, prison abuse, detention without trial, violations of habeas corpus, and disgustingly invasive airport security measures. He deported immigrants more than Bush did. He increased funding for the drug war in Mexico. He invoked the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined, tortured a whistleblower, and claimed the right to unilaterally kill any U.S. citizen on Earth without even a nod from Congress or a shrug from the courts.

The left-liberals who stand by this war criminal and Wall Street shill have made their choice: better to have the militarism and police state, so long as it means a little more influence over domestic politics, even if that too is compromised by corporate interference, than it is to embrace a radical antiwar agenda that might complicate their domestic aspirations.

Our critics complain that America has "moved to the right" in the last three decades, and that would supposedly include Obama’s record so far, which appears in most part like a third Bush term. Yet not a single one of the egregious policies above passes libertarian muster. They are all anathema to the libertarian. And so are almost all policies embarked upon in the last three generations. And surely, this is true most of all for the wars. The few honest folks on the left recognize this. As the iconoclast Thad Russell puts it:

I’m a man of the left. I was raised by socialists in Berkeley. I’ve always been on the left. I stumbled upon Antiwar.com about three years ago. . . . This is what the left should be doing. This is what the left should be saying. . . . Libertarians like Antiwar.com, like Ron Paul, have been the leading voices of the antiwar movement. They’ve been the most principled, the most consistent, no matter who’s president. They’ve been saying again and again and again: "These wars are disasters. The empire must end." And the left shuns them because they either think they’re shills for corporations or they're racists or they don’t care about people. How could they not care about people if they’re the leading voices against killing people in our name?

Indeed, if we truly did not care about people, why would we libertarians waste so much time fighting what often seems to be a Sisyphean battle? Why not just lobby for federal contracts in Washington? Why not get government jobs and live off the taxpayer? Why not just ignore politics altogether, instead of fretting day and night about oppressive policies whose direct effects are most often borne by other people? The fact is, libertarianism is an ethical system whose discovery tends to compel its adherents to fight – and not mostly for themselves, but for the freedom of their fellow man, for perfect strangers.

Unfortunately, most of the left would rather not focus on the 98% of the Obama agenda that mirrors that of George W. Bush, including all the war on terror excesses they condemned for seven years. Or they comically attribute Obama’s Bush-like record as being part of the "culture of individualism" that we libertarians are somehow responsible for. Libertarianism, you see, can be found in the Obama White House as much as it lurks behind every Bush. You can expand government in every area but if you say something nice about the market or cut taxes by a couple percent, everything bad that happens on your watch is to be blamed on libertarianism.

Whether a willful misdirection or not, these leftists target their animus upon those who dare think that a nearly four-trillion-dollar federal government is too big, blaming Republicans for being too libertarian and blaming libertarians for being too idealistic or selfish. They even go after Ron Paul, who has always promised to scale back the warfare state and drug war immediately, while being more gradualist on welfare. They’ll even attack him for his heroic stand on legalizing heroin. Why? They have to challenge the very idea of libertarianism, even if it means bashing us for positions we thought they shared, such as on drug reform.

During the Bush years, many libertarians, myself included, said we would happily tolerate, for the time being anyway, the Democrats’ welfare state if it actually meant the end of the neocon war machine and police state. Of course, now we have all three in fuller force than in many decades. While for the sake of peace, many of us would tolerate welfare, the liberals are different: For the sake of welfare, they will tolerate war or at least the emperor waging it. Karl Hess was right: "Whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up an apologist for mass murder."

Everyone who votes for Barack Obama, a man with the blood of thousands of innocents on his hands, all to avoid another Republican administration that will presumably (but unlikely) slash back the domestic state, would seem to have some sorry priorities. You really care about the poorest, most innocent people? Throw your party, your president, your social democratic dreams under the bus – threaten to withhold your votes from any Democrat who lends his support to any war ever again.

Such talk about withdrawing consent from the state frightens the statist left, who may also be quite embarrassed that the most principled opponents of empire and oppression are obviously not the economic interventionists, but those whose philosophy lies somewhere on the spectrum between anarchism and anti-Federalism. Aside from their sheer embarrassment there is another explanation for their deflection, for their attacks on libertarianism while their president shreds the Bill of Rights, bankrupts the country, and slaughters in their name: The left knows that in the very long run, libertarianism really is the great philosophical adversary it must contend with. Conservatism is categorically the ideology of the past. The future clash will be between those who seek freedom from the state and those who seek salvation through the state, those who see the state as the enemy and those who somehow think the state can protect the masses from the ruling class. As libertarians, our dream is more utopian and our ideals are loftier, but our understanding of reality is also much more grounded and justified. Voluntarism and the market are far more humane and productive than any coercive alternative. The state is the enemy of the little guy. This is an immutable truth of the human condition. Obama, like Bush before him, only demonstrates the impossibility of divorcing the party of power from the party of privilege. Eventually the young, the idealistic, and those who hope for real change will retreat from the lying promises of leftist statism and embrace the radical and realistic program of individual liberty. It has already begun to happen, which is why the other side is frantic and scared.

I read Fahrenheit 451 straight through for the first time yesterday. An excellent piece of literature and highly recommended.

I found this passage to be particularly interesting:

Quote:

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

It made me wonder how many people today believe that freedom and equality are not inherent - that they can only come about by force (the state).

How many people today believe that freedom and force are not contradictory? How many people don't even realize they believe so?

"Terrorism" or "terrorist" may not be as far off the mark as some people think, but nonetheless it still seems like the wrong word to use to describe the Tea Party or those of the Libertarian ilk to me. Certainly though the metaphors get the point across well- These people are fanatics.

Here's what Politico has to say-

"Terrorism is a tough term, but, unfortunately, it describes tea party tactics precisely. Their first step was to vow not to vote to raise the debt ceiling.

It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House hostage takers. But they have now become full-blown terrorists.

They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve their political goals. A strong America has always stood firm in the face of terrorism. That tradition is in jeopardy, as Congress and President Barack careen toward an uncertain outcome in the tea party- manufactured debt crisis.

Rather than reject the unthinkable, the tea party harnessed this potential harm as its weapon of mass destruction.

For pragmatists, it allowed a hostage-taking. The pragmatists threatened to defeat a raise in the debt ceiling unless Congress and President Barack Obama rejected taxes on the wealthy and accepted budget cuts that would move the country toward the tea partys idealized vision of an America. Their dream is an alternate version of the United States before the New Deal, the Great Society and civil rights laws alleviated massive inequality and injustice and extended American opportunity.

The tea party faction could not achieve these goals through straight up democratic means because of their unpopularity. So it resorted to its threat of mass destruction. They were able to do so because they formed a disciplined bloc that gave them leverage over the House leadership and because of the threat that members who did not go along would face primary challenges from the right."
~ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/60202.html

"Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog"~ Sir Winston Churchill. We are nurturing a nightmare that will haunt our children, and kill theirs.

"Terrorism" or "terrorist" may not be as far off the mark as some people think, but nonetheless it still seems like the wrong word to use to describe the Tea Party or those of the Libertarian ilk to me. Certainly though the metaphors get the point across well- These people are fanatics.

Here's what Politico has to say-

"Terrorism is a tough term, but, unfortunately, it describes tea party tactics precisely. Their first step was to vow not to vote to raise the debt ceiling.

It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House hostage takers. But they have now become full-blown terrorists.

They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve their political goals. A strong America has always stood firm in the face of terrorism. That tradition is in jeopardy, as Congress and President Barack careen toward an uncertain outcome in the tea party- manufactured debt crisis.

Rather than reject the unthinkable, the tea party harnessed this potential harm as its weapon of mass destruction.

For pragmatists, it allowed a hostage-taking. The pragmatists threatened to defeat a raise in the debt ceiling unless Congress and President Barack Obama rejected taxes on the wealthy and accepted budget cuts that would move the country toward the tea partys idealized vision of an America. Their dream is an alternate version of the United States before the New Deal, the Great Society and civil rights laws alleviated massive inequality and injustice and extended American opportunity.

The tea party faction could not achieve these goals through straight up democratic means because of their unpopularity. So it resorted to its threat of mass destruction. They were able to do so because they formed a disciplined bloc that gave them leverage over the House leadership and because of the threat that members who did not go along would face primary challenges from the right."
~ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/60202.html

Lets ratchet up the rhetoric a bit and see who falls for it.

NoahJ"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err." - Mahatma Gandhi

WHEREAS many of Our Subjects in divers Parts of our Colonies and Plantations in North America, misled by dangerous and ill designing men, and forgetting the Allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them; after various disorderly acts committed in disturbance of the publick peace, to the obstruction of lawful commerce, and to the oppression of our loyal subjects carrying on the same; have at length proceeded to open and avowed rebellion, by arraying themselves in a hostile manner, to withstand the execution of the law, and traitorously preparing, ordering and levying war against us: And whereas there is reason to apprehend that such rebellion hath been much promoted and encouraged by the traitorous correspondence, counsels and comfort of divers wicked and desperate persons within this realm: To the end therefore, that none of our subjects may neglect or violate their duty through ignorance thereof, or through any doubt of the protection which the law will afford to their loyalty and zeal, we have thought fit, by and with the advice of our Privy Council, to issue our Royal Proclamation, hereby declaring, that not only all our Officers, civil and military, are obliged to exert their utmost endeavours to suppress such rebellion, and to bring the traitors to justice, but that all our subjects of this Realm, and the dominions thereunto belonging, are bound by law to be aiding and assisting in the suppression of such rebellion, and to disclose and make known all traitorous conspiracies and attempts against us, our crown and dignity; and we do accordingly strictly charge and command all our Officers, as well civil as military, and all others our obedient and loyal subjects, to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion, and to disclose and make known all treasons and traitorous conspiracies which they shall know to be against us, our crown and dignity; and for that purpose, that they transmit to one of our principal Secretaries of State, or other proper officer, due and full information of all persons who shall be found carrying on correspondence with, or in any manner or degree aiding or abetting the persons now in open arms and rebellion against our Government, within any of our Colonies and Plantations in North America, in order to bring to condign punishment the authors, perpetrators, and abetters of such traitorous designs.

Given at our Court at St. James's the twenty-third day of August, one thousand
seven hundred and seventy five, in the fifteenth year of our reign.

God save the King.

I'm sure if the words "terrorist" or "extremist" had been part of the vernacular of the day, we'd see those words in this declaration.

While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group. But if we look at the State naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even nonlibertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls "war," or sometimes "suppression of subversion"; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls "conscription"; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls "taxation." The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is [p. 25] Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.

I left the libertarian party in 2008, partly because of the banking crisis, but mostly because they nominated Bob Barr (drug warrior, anti-gay, no real libertarian imho). Looking at the website now, it looks like they are explicitly supporting gay rights and the end of the drug war, so I am a little more pro-libertarian.

You can’t truly embrace liberty and the libertarian political philosophy until you understand something very important. Every second of every day, you have a gun pointed at your head.

What do I mean? It’s obvious. Right now, you have a gun pointed at your head, ready to shoot and kill you. But you can’t see it. My goal is to help you see it. It’s there. It’s always been there. Since the day you were born, it’s been there.

There are people in this world, many of them, who want to control you. They aren’t content with controlling only themselves. They want to control you, too. And the only way to do this is with violence. Some of them will walk up to you, point a gun at your head, and tell you to either hand over your money, or to get into their car. Others will walk into a ballot box and file a secret ballot, voting for the candidate who’s made all sorts of promises that amount to controlling you. The means are somewhat different, though not really, but the end is the same. Control.

Why? Why do they want to control you? Two reasons: 1) Because they are dissatisfied with their lot in life. They don’t like having to live off the sweat of their own brow. They want to live off the sweat of yours. It’s much easier and less painful to live off of others. And 2) because they don’t like what you are doing. You aren’t hurting anybody, but what you are doing is offensive to them. And how dare you do something offensive to them!

How do I know that you have a gun pointed at your head? Because the moment you resist their control, the gun will become visible. It’s just waiting to show itself. For now it’s content with being invisible. That’s been enough to keep you in line. The moment you decide to resist is the moment the gun takes forms. Try not paying your taxes. Try consuming certain plants in the privacy of your own home. Try paying an unlicensed practitioner for a service. Try buying raw milk. Try operating a lemonade stand. Try worshiping the wrong god. There are thousands of ways that we are being controlled. Resist any of them, and you will soon find yourself looking down the barrel of a gun. Resist further, and you will be shot.

Until you understand this hard truth, you cannot understand liberty. Learn it. See it.

"If we say that the United States should abolish child labor in very poor countries," Boaz said, "then what will happen to these children? ... They're not suddenly going to go to the country day school. ... They may be out selling their bodies on the street. That is not an improvement over working in a t-shirt factory."

In fact, studies show that in at least one country where child labor was suddenly banned, prostitution increased. Good economics teaches that as poor countries get richer and freer, capital investment raises the productivity of labor and child labor diminishes. There's no shortcut through government prohibition—unless you like starvation and child prostitution.

He states the first fallacy thusly: “By making these radical changes, we are removing the root cause of all the failures and evils of society as it presently stands. This will eliminate all of the existing problems, and since we have no knowledge of what new problems might arise, we can assume there will be none. Everything will work right, because there are no foreseeable things that can go wrong.”

In other words, he accuses libertarians of being utopian. This is not only untrue but the opposite of the truth. Utilitarian libertarians are such precisely because they reject the utopian notions of statism and social contract. The belief that we can grant a monopoly on violence to an institution, along with the authority to determine whether its own actions are permissable — in other words, to grant limitless power to an entity and then say, “Limit yourself” — that is the truly utopian and unrealistic fantasy of a naive mind.

This accusation is a straw man because libertarianism does not assert that our lives will be problem-free if only our radical changes are made effective. Libertarianism asserts that the answer to the non-violent ills of society is not violence; that murder, theft and fraud are wrong no matter who commits them; that we ought to be free to voluntarily pursue solutions to problems instead of having solutions forced upon us.

I am always a little surprised by the way many people - when they come face to face with the prospect of genuine freedom - tend to reject it.

When they understand that freedom also includes freedom to fail and freedom to make foolish choices they say wait a minute, some government authority who knows better should protect me from those things.

Or they say that although they may not themselves need such protection, there need to be protections for the clueless and the stupid. “Those people” - you know, the common people, those lesser folk out in the hinterland who aren’t part of our cadre of elites - they need some someone in charge to stop them from making bad choices or taking foolish risks.

And once we begin to implement these protections, we find that they’re not enough. There are loopholes. Some people are falling through the cracks. Despite our attempts to protect them from themselves, they’re still finding ways to do stupid things.

So we need a more comprehensive set of protections. More rules, and more restrictions on what they (and all of us) can do.

And so it goes. We’re becoming a moribund society. Tying ourselves into regulatory knots in the name of protecting the least common denominator from himself.

“Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. and the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” THEN existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves.” -Lysander Spooner

This is true of the U.S. Constitution (an actual contract) and infinitely moreso the magical “social contract” that no one signed, agreed to, or otherwise entered into by choice, and which mindless statist drones think applies to taxation, regulation, national service, healthcare, and who knows what other manner of things. There is no moral obligation to pay for services you don’t want; to assert that it is rightful or justifiable for someone to threaten you with violence to “pay your fair share,” upon the basis of some mythical social contract for services which they presume you have received and not paid for indescribably and self-evidently asinine.

If your pregnant mother happens to be walking through a field that I have arbitrarily claimed goes into labor, and deposits you in the grass, what sane person would contend that you owed me rent for the rest of your life, in addition to fees for services you don’t want for yourself and others, funds to pay my military to wage war against the woodland creatures, and a salary for the very jackboots who are sent to collect such rents?

I’ll save the noble, idealistic statists the trouble of effecting a pitiful response by doing it for you: “Nuh-uh.”